MISOVERESTIMATING TERRORISM John Mueller Ohio State University

MISOVERESTIMATING TERRORISM John Mueller Ohio State University and Cato Institute Mark G. Stewart University of Newcastle November 24, 2015 Prepared for presentation at the Constructions of Terrorism Conference sponsored by TRENDS Research and Advisory, Abu Dhabi, and the Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara Santa Barbara, California, December 3-4, 2015. John Mueller Woody Hayes Senior Research Scientist, Mershon Center for International Security Studies Adjunct Professor, Department of Political Science Ohio State University Columbus, Ohio 43201, United States Cato Senior Fellow, Cato Institute 1000 Massachusetts Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20001, United States politicalscience.osu.edu/faculty/jmueller +1 614 247-6007 [email protected] Mark G. Stewart Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow Professor and Director, Centre for Infrastructure Performance and Reliability The University of Newcastle New South Wales, 2308, Australia www.newcastle.edu.au/research-centre/cipar/staff/mark-stewart.html +61 2 49216027 [email protected] ABSTRACT: While it is not true that 9/11 “changed everything,” the tragedy did have a strong impact on language, on how terrorism has come to be understood and explained. First, its apparent incidence has been multiplied by effectively re-defining insurgency as terrorism. Accordingly, the category of “civil war” may be in the process of going out of existence—and the same could even happen for much international war. Second, extrapolating wildly from the apparent capacities of the 9/11 hijackers, the threat presented internationally by small bands of terrorists has been greatly exaggerated, sometimes even to the point of deeming it to be existential—a process that may be repeating itself with ISIS. This paper examines these issues, and it also assesses the limited importance of the terrorism phenomenon more generally. Mueller and Stewart, Misoverestimating Terrorism 2 By the standards of an earlier age, terrorism remains a limited phenomenon. That could have changed if terrorists became capable of sporadically launching destruction on a vast scale— of repeatedly replicating 9/11. That hasn’t happened of course and, fortunately, it does not seem to be in the cards. While it is not true that 9/11 “changed everything,” the tragedy did have a strong impact on language, on how terrorism has come to be understood and explained. First, its apparent incidence has been multiplied by effectively re-defining insurgency as terrorism. Accordingly, the category of “civil war” may be in the process of going out of existence—and the same could even happen for much international war. Second, extrapolating wildly from the apparent capacities of the 9/11 hijackers, the threat presented internationally by small bands of terrorists has been greatly exaggerated, sometimes even to the point of deeming it to be existential—a process that may be repeating itself with ISIS. This paper examines these issues, and it also assesses the limited importance of the terrorism phenomenon more generally. Criminal and disciplined warfare, crime and terrorism, and the frequency of violence When violence is sporadic, it is called “terrorism” if the perpetrators are disciplined and have an ideological or policy goal. It is called “crime” when their goal is financial enrichment. If their violence becomes frequent and if the perpetrators are disciplined and have a policy or ideological goal, the activity is called disciplined war. This can be either conventional or unconventional depending on whether combat is characterized by tactics that might be called Clausewitzian or regimental or whether it is characterized by hit-and-run guerrilla (or primitive) ones. If the violence perpetrated becomes frequent, and if the perpetrators are primarily devoted to financial enrichment, the activity is called criminal war, and it is characterized by brigand or warlord bands, or by freebooting or mercenary behavior.1 Thus, when either form of violence—disciplined or criminal—becomes continuous or sustained enough, it will look like, and be called, “war.” Disciplined combatants generally fight to win, to conclude the conflict in order to return to a safer life as civilians or as professionals in a peacetime army. Criminal combatants, on the other hand, are frequently less likely to want to see the war end because they often are better off in war and face unemployment or a return to criminality in a country that has been impoverished by the very war they have just waged.2 The continuum between terrorism and disciplined warfare is central to the discussion in this paper, and it can be illustrated by the writings on guerrilla warfare by Mao Zedong. He distinguished three phases as parsed by Samuel Griffith. The first is essentially defensive and involves setting up rear bases and gaining popular support. Phase 2 involves “progressive expansion” in which dedicated combatants engage in offensive terrorism and sabotage against the enemy focusing on both military targets and civilian ones and putting the enemy under “relentless and continually mounting pressure.” This sort of violence employs full-fledged guerrilla or insurgency warfare (also sometimes called partisan or people’s war) built around a hit-and-run approach. “The ability to run away,” declares Mao, “is the essence of the guerrilla.” 1 On these distinctions, see also Mueller 2004, 18-20. 2. Once the war is over, criminals are likely to return to their predatory ways when they are decommissioned and released among the civilian population. In fact, even non-criminals in a criminal army may turn to crime when they return to civilian life: when most soldiers are, or seem to be, criminals, employers are likely to discriminate against all ex-soldiers as a shortcut method for avoiding the hiring of criminals and other undesirables, a process often exacerbated by the fact that war very frequently weakens economies. Mueller and Stewart, Misoverestimating Terrorism 3 Finally, in phase 3, the weakened enemy would be engaged, and crushed, by conventional, stand- and-fight warfare.3 The goal for those engaged in counter-guerrilla or counter-insurgency warfare is to reverse the process by reducing insurgency activities to more bearable terrorist levels. Similarly, those combating criminal warfare will seek to reduce the frequency of the violence criminal bands commit. When successful, “war” will cease to exist, and any violence and predation that remains will be indistinguishable from ordinary crime.4 Shifting definitions: Terrorism and insurgency If one removes 9/11 from the consideration (which does not mean ignoring either the event or its consequences), the number of fatalities committed by terrorists of all stripes outside war zones, has been, with very few exceptions, remarkably low both before and after 9/11. A country-by-country summary of fatalities from all forms of terrorism for the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia is shown in table 1. There were 3,292 fatalities from terrorist incidents within the United States during the 38-year period covered in the table. However, the 9/11 attacks in 2001 represented almost all of these and most of the rest come from the attack by a domestic (and non-Islamic) terrorist, Timothy McVeigh, on a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995: 3,140 in total. In all, this generates an annual fatality risk for the period of 1 in 4 million for the United States for the period 1970-2013. The rates in other developed countries in the table are similar. For the period since 9/11, the annual terrorism fatality rate for the U.S. is 1 in 110 million. One can also focus on the kind of terrorism that really concerns people in the developed world by restricting the consideration to violence committed by Muslim extremists anywhere in the world outside of war zones, whether that violence is perpetrated by domestic Islamist terrorists or by ones with international connections. Included in the count would be terrorism of the much-publicized sort that occurred in Bali in 2002 and 2005, in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Turkey in 2003, in the Philippines, Madrid, and Egypt in 2004, in London and Jordan in 2005, and in Mumbai in 2008. Three publications from think tanks have independently provided lists or tallies of such violence committed in the several years after the 9/11 attacks. The lists include not only attacks by al-Qaeda but also those by its imitators, enthusiasts, lookalikes, and wannabes, as well as ones by groups with no apparent connection to it whatever. Although these tallies make for grim reading, for most of the period since 9/11 the total number of people killed by Muslim extremists outside of war zones comes to some 200 to 400 per year.5 That, of course, is 200 to 400 too 3 Essence of the guerrilla: Kaldor 1999, 97. Mao’s phases: Griffith 1978, 17-19. 4 Criminal warfare should not be confused with the sort of unconventional, yet disciplined, warfare carried out by guerrilla warriors or by what anthropologists call “primitive” ones. The tactics applied by such unconventional combatants often resemble those employed by criminal ones—a reliance on hit-and-run raids that target civilians and a wariness about set-piece battles. Moreover, as with criminal warfare, such warfare is often waged with limited logistic backup and without much in the way of a well-developed strategy beyond attrition. But unconventional warfare, like terrorism, can actually can be quite dedicated, or disciplined, in the sense that combatants, who have sometimes been trained from birth, often fight with ordered devotion and a willingness to die for their cause or group—or for each other. Keeley 1996, 42-48; see also Lieven 1998, 5, 130, 324-54; Valentino 2004; Mueller 2004. When that is the case, such combat would be considered disciplined by the definitions developed here.

Load more